Delia Accepts the Tribal Attorney Position and Decides to Return to the Reservation

Delia Ortiz’s decision to accept the tribal attorney position is a reversal shaped by both an earlier refusal and a later reckoning with her life in Washington, D.C. Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz first offers her the job as a way to bring a capable lawyer home and make her example visible to others who have left. Delia rejects that vision, protecting the life she has made with Philip Cachora. Only after their marriage reaches a breaking point does she call back and accept. The change is not simply a career move: it is her choice to return to a place she had long dismissed as somewhere she would never go back to.

The Offer and Its Purpose

Delia is working as a lawyer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs when Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz asks whether she has considered returning to the reservation. Her response is emphatic: she likes Washington, D.C., loves her work, and has not been near the reservation for years. The question therefore brings into the open a distance she has treated as settled, rather than a plan she has been quietly making.

Gabe’s offer is direct. Elias Segundo is about to retire, and the tribe will need a new attorney; Gabe offers Delia the position without first reviewing her academic record or speaking to her supervisors. When she challenges the basis for his decision, he points to her intelligence and to her mother, Ellie Chavez. His confidence rests on what he sees in Delia and on her family, rather than on the conventional professional checks she asks about.

The offer is also about more than filling a vacancy. Gabe sees Delia as one of the Tohono O’odham’s lost girls and believes that her return might encourage others to come home. Delia recognizes the implication and asks whether he expects her to be a role model. He says she would be. In his framing, her legal ability and her connection to the community belong together: taking the job could make her return consequential beyond her own household.

Why She Refuses

Delia’s refusal rests first on the life Philip has established. His gallery, business, and friends are in Washington, D.C., and she believes he would never agree to move. She does not voice every reservation about him in that conversation, but Gabe already knows about Philip’s drinking and drug use, which he has witnessed himself. The contrast is sharp: Delia treats her husband’s life in the city as a reason the move cannot happen, while Gabe sees their circumstances as something that might change if they returned to her roots.

That suggestion irritates Delia. She is willing to worry about Philip’s difficulties as his wife, but resents a relative stranger advising her about them. She insists that Philip will be fine and that she will be fine too, then stands and thanks Gabe for the offer while declining it. Her departure closes the conversation, but not the question it has raised. She understands that Gabe sees more of her situation than she wants him to, even as she refuses his proposal.

The refusal also reflects the distance between Delia’s present life and the family history behind her. She thinks of girls whose mothers could not provide what Ellie Chavez, with Ruth Waldron’s help, provided for her. That recognition makes Gabe’s appeal to her as a possible example personally charged. Yet at this point, the responsibilities and attachments she associates with Washington outweigh the possibility of returning. She leaves the offer unanswered in practice, even though it will remain available to her.

The Crisis That Changes Her Course

Delia’s circumstances worsen after the conversation. Philip’s outburst during an argument and his subsequent collapse into sickness mark a turn she recognizes as the beginning of the end, though she continues hoping that he will improve. Two weeks later, she comes home early from work with a migraine and finds Philip passed out with a sixteen-year-old male sex worker. She leaves without waking either of them and checks into the Savoy, making the rupture physical as well as marital: she is no longer staying in the apartment with him.

The immediate aftermath is spent in uncertainty. Delia sees her ob-gyn for tests for sexually transmitted diseases and must wait until Monday for the results. She does not call her mother, especially because she does not want to shatter the favorable view Ruth has of Philip or make Ellie confront what feels to Delia like a repetition of painful family history. Alone in the hotel, she worries about whether Philip might have contracted HIV and passed it to her. The waiting narrows her attention to the outcome of the tests and to what the marriage has become.

Before dawn the next morning, Delia finds the strength to seek contact information for the Cachoras in Santa Fe. She later decides she has learned what she needed to know and does not call Marcella Cachora back or try the other numbers. The sequence does not present a tidy reconciliation with her family as the cause of her return. Instead, it shows Delia turning toward the possibility of home after the future she had organized around Philip has become untenable.

Acceptance and Return

On Monday afternoon, Delia learns that she is HIV-negative, but the news barely registers at first. In a daze, she makes her way to a pay phone, obtains the tribal chairman’s number, and reaches Gabe. She identifies herself and asks whether the tribal attorney job is still available. When he confirms that it is, she pauses, takes a deep breath, and says she would like to accept if he will have her.

Gabe welcomes her home and notes that Julia Joaquin will be pleased. The call completes a change that the first interview could not: Delia no longer treats returning as an impossibility dictated by Philip’s business, friends, and habits. The position has remained open, but the decisive difference is hers. She now asks to take it, after having first insisted that neither she nor Philip needed to change course.

Significance of the Decision

The episode gives Delia’s return a clear personal and professional shape without suggesting that accepting the job resolves every difficulty ahead. She moves from work at a federal agency to an offered legal position for the tribe, and from an insistence on preserving her life with Philip to a decision made after separating herself from the immediate crisis of their marriage. The narrative links that choice to the prospect Gabe had raised: a lawyer returning could serve as an example to others who have left, even though Delia initially resists being assigned that role.

Her change of mind also revises the meaning of home. At first, the reservation is a place she has not visited for years and has no reason to return to; Gabe’s offer sounds like an intrusion into a life she believes is settled. After the relationship falters, she chooses to reopen the possibility herself. The acceptance is therefore both a return to family and community and a new professional commitment, made not when Gabe first asks but when Delia is ready to answer.